Join Times staff writer Richard Winton on Tuesday at 9 a.m. for a L.A. Now Live chat about a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge who has made claims of excessive force by the UCLA Police Department. David S. Cunningham III is not only a judge but the former president of the Los Angeles Police Commission and a onetime federal civil rights attorney. Winton reported that Cunningham found himself handcuffed in the back of a UCLA police car on Saturday morning. Officers had pulled him over as he was driving his Mercedes out of his Westwood gym because, police said, he wasn't wearing his seat belt.

January 27, 2014 | By Richard Winton, This post had been corrected. See note below for details.

A jury has found that a Los Angeles Police Department officer used excessive force in the fatal shooting of an unarmed man and awarded $750,000 in damages to the man's son. The Los Angeles County Superior Court jury decided last week that Officer Daniel Bunch used unreasonable force when he fatally shot Dontaze Storey Jr., 47, in November 2008 in front of the man's pregnant fiancee. Jurors acquitted a second officer, Oliver Malabuya. The shooting occurred after a foot pursuit Nov. 11, 2008, near 3rd Street and New Hampshire Avenue.

The Seattle Police Department has broken its trust with the community by using excessive force, charged federal investigators who called for more training and better supervision. The conclusions were reached after more than eight months of investigation into the department's use of force, Assistant Atty. Gen. Thomas E. Perez of the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division told reporters Friday at a Seattle news conference. "We found that the systems of accountability are broken.

A jury this week found that a Los Angeles police officer used excessive force when he handcuffed a partially paralyzed man tightly enough to cause nerve damage to the man's wrist. Allen Harris, 56, was awarded nearly $1.6 million Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court for his injuries, marking the latest in a long string of seven-figure verdicts against the Los Angeles Police Department for officer misconduct. On Thursday, the jury returned to court and took the somewhat unusual step of ordering the accused officer, Alex Tellez, to pay an additional $90,000 himself after finding "clear and convincing evidence" that he acted maliciously toward Harris, according to court records.

A federal jury has found that a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy used excessive force during a confrontation with a detainee at the North County Correctional Facility in Saugus. Javier Rocha, 29, charged in his civil damage suit that Deputy David Sameyah pulled him out of a line of inmates waiting to enter the jail library March 17, 1999, then took him into a room where he kicked and beat him.

September 9, 2011 | By Jeffrey Fleishman and Amro Hassan, Los Angeles Times

A former high-ranking security official testified Thursday that forces loyal to Hosni Mubarak were ordered to use excessive force to crush protests in the early days of a revolution that would later topple the president. The police general's testimony said the order came from then-Interior Minister Habib Adli, an accusation that suggests the highest levels of the Mubarak government plotted the crackdown that killed more than 800 people from Jan. 25 through Feb. 11. It was unclear, however, whether Adli directly called for firing live ammunition.

The FBI investigation into the Burbank Police Department is focusing on allegations of excessive force by officers, court documents obtained by The Times on Thursday show. Federal investigators have told Burbank officials to turn over reports involving 12 current and former officers, according to a federal grand jury subpoena obtained by The Times. The investigation involves at least two incidents, including one stemming from a robbery investigation at the well-known Portos Bakery.

Background: The Los Angeles Police Department has a strict "use of force" policy, instructing officers to resort to it only when facing a "credible threat"--and then only to use the "minimum amount" necessary. But the King beating is only the latest in a series of prominent incidents questioning police compliance.

A federal jury Monday found that a former Los Angeles police officer used excessive force in a fatal 2008 shooting. The unanimous verdict in U.S. District Court against Joseph Cruz and the city of Los Angeles was essentially a rejection of Cruz's account of the shooting. Since March 25, 2008, when Mohammad Usman Chaudhry was killed on a Hollywood street in the pre-dawn darkness, Cruz has insisted that Chaudhry tried to attack him with a knife and that he fired his gun in self-defense.